Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Features English is missing - but most other languages have" video.

@kekeke8988 I'm in my 30s. These were common when I was in primary school. Noticably, most of them vanished as the kids got older and expanded their vocabulary, but to the best of my knowledge they can still be heard from kids, poorly educated people, and various media (though there it's often hard to tell if its intentionally trying for a specific tone or the writers are just bad at their jobs.(and varies from show to show besides.))
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-ette is a diminutive suffix, by the by. It's Where we got 'diskette' (a smaller disc) from, for example. (And, yes, it is often used to indicate femininity as well, as is common in many languages)... Possibly cassette too (a small case, which holds the tape). There are a few others diminutive ... Thingies... Too, but as is the case with a lot of things like this, they're mostly not super productive in modern standard English. Not across dialects, at least.
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@galoomba5559 a significant chunk of the failures, from memory and assuming that's the zompist article I think it is, was a computer having trouble telling the difference between a digraph and a syllable boundary with one of the components of a digraph on each side of it, which is less of a problem for humans. That said, for all that Most of the issues with English orthography are poor explanation more than a poor system, it Does have some room for improvement, and I wish it would do the following: Mark stress! This one change renders the Entire vowel system vastly more intelligible, as a lot of the spelling rules for vowels seem to apply or not at random. Most of the time it's actually that they only apply to stressed or unstressed bowels with no other indication as to which you're dealing with. (Collapsing the unreasonable number of different ways to spell what is called 'the long E sound' wouldn't hurt either) English has a rule against ending words in V. This rule needs to die. It results in V sounds spelled with f (forcing f sounds to be spelled as ff, when they're not ph), or as ve... With no concern for the fact that there's a rule that says the E affects the vowel on the other side of the v unless the v is doubled... Except there's a (actually reasonable) rule against doubling V as well! C has the same problem as V, but uses s and k to cheat around the doubling limit. (Also, v tends not to show up in the middle of words. C does, so you sometimes see cc, but that's not double c, that's k-syllable break-s. If there were Not a syllable break it would be written as x. And then there's -ough. Just... -ough. It's a disaster that needs to die. Four things. Fix them and the vast majority of English's nonsensical spelling problems are solved. You still have some stupid silent letters that could be done away with here and there, but given the disaster that is US spelling as a result of Trying to do that (and not taking dialects into account), and the fact that a fair number of them are "this individual word is just dumb" but quite a few others are 'this is only silent in this form due to other factors, it Comes Back when we add/remove an affix. Having it silent in this form is a much simpler rule than the one that would be needed to explain when and why to add it to the others'. And Then there's the homophones, spelled differently for improved reading comprehension/speed. They often use silent letters. Not arbitrarily, morethe sound was lost in spoken english but the spelling's unchanged. So, on balance, I'd leave silent letters alone so as not to break anything. Note that only One change involves altering the character set, and none of them involve learning new values for any character. Two of them are eliminating exceptions that only Cause problems! 90% sure the V rule is an artifact of how recently (as such things go) U, V, And W came to have distinct forms and values. The history of which is long, convoluted, and also the origin of Y, and I think another letter I'm forgetting. Basically, one written form was used at the begining of words, the other elsewhere, and both were used for all three sounds. So, of course, when they could be confused you needed Sone way to indicate which you meant, right? Which eventually became standardized into the current mess.
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